George Russell - Listen to the Silence
Let's sneak in this anniversary special under the deadline wire, if for no other reason than the concert smokes like a tight spliff rolled just right.
There's other reasons, of course there are always other reasons. I was gonna put this up for George Russell's 90th birthday this past 6/23, but I was so caught up in Bernard Purdie world at that time, my laundry machine developed a distinct backbeat with accents on the one and three.
To try to explain what George Russell was all about during his orthodoxy-eviscerating, thoroughly individual career, I'd need a grad-level course in Harmony, because a single blog post is not gonna make a dent in the rent.
To keep it within the friendly confines of a single Blogger page, he essentially came on the scene as a drummer in the 1940s, got tuberculosis, and came out of the hospital as a pianist with a whole new theory of music written down and ready to steamroll convention into a stale pancake.
Called the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization -- and based on the idea that Jazz harmonic concepts, developed in the 20th century, ought to be of equal weight to the Classical ones that had defined music up to that point -- his ideas around how scales and chords related to modes hit like an IED at the intersection of Fifths Circle and Middle C Place.
These ideas began to heavily infiltrate Jazz, and by the 1950s he was recording as a leader, with his compositions being recorded by the likes of Bill Evans and Dizzy Gillespie, to name but two.
As the 1950s progressed into Hard Bop, the Lydian Chromatic Concept began to inform the shift towards modal chordal organization that resulted in cornerstone recordings like Blue Train by John Coltrane and, most principally, Miles Davis' ultra-seminal Kind of Blue in 1959.
George Russell spent his career recording as the leader of a bunch of different ensembles, and invented a whole passel of standard compositions around his theories, which reoriented the relationship of chords to modes and were the first incorporated into standard Music Theory to come from the world of Jazz.
As the 1960s became the 1970s and beyond, his music drifted more and more into Fusion and electronics. Here's a potent banger of an example, taped 35 years ago today in Scotland.
George Russell
Living Time Orchestra
4th Glasgow International Jazz Festival
Theatre Royal
Glasgow, Scotland UK
7.6.1990
01 Listen to the Silence
02 Uncommon Ground
03 An American Trilogy i) The Day John Brown Was Hanged
04 An American Trilogy ii) The Ballad of Hicks Bluet
05 An American Trilogy iii) You Are My Sunshine
06 So What
Total time: 1:17:00
George Russell - keyboards, director & conductor
Stuart Brooks - trumpet
Tiger Okoshi - trumpet
Tim Hagans - trumpet
Dave Bargeron - trombone
Ashley Slater - bass trombone
David Mann - alto saxophone
Andy Sheppard - tenor & soprano saxophone
John Purcell - baritone saxophone
Brad Hatfield - keyboards
Teese Gohl - keyboards
David Fiuczynski - guitar
Bill Urmson - bass
Steve Johns - drums
Pat Hollenbeck - percussion
psyKies' 1st gen VHS, off-air FM dub from the original BBC3 broadcast
retracked, repaired & slightly remastered by EN, July 2025
535 MB FLAC/direct link
535 MB FLAC/direct link
I shall return with more burn for your urn shortly, but don't be a Lydiot! And make sure you learn all about the great George Russell immediately, courtesy of this incendiary 77 minutes of mayhem.--J.
6.23.1923 - 7.27.2009